Re: font-lock-syntactic-keywords obsolet?

[Dmitry Gutov]

Hi Alan,

On 06/21/2016 06:26 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> my insistence that there
> are several strategies which can be adopted for handling syntax-table
> text properties.

This is the kind of vague statement that I've seen a lot, and does not 
further the discussion. Yes, there can be lots of approaches to doing 
stuff. It's a truism.

> You seem to be of the opposite opinion, that there is
> one single blessed way of doing this handling, and any other way is thus
> the Wrong Thing.

No. Of any statements I've made the only one that sounds close is that 
when we're caching syntactic information in a buffer, there must be only 
one source of truth, and not multiple. That is from the comment-cache 
discussion.

Again, if you insist on continuing using the bare after-change-functions 
approach in CC Mode, I'm fine with that, provided you deal with all the 
performance-related consequences, and that you don't try to work around 
its problems by pushing solutions tailored to CC Mode to the core, 
ignoring the needs of the rest of the modes.

> As far as I am aware, there has never been a general discussion on
> emacs-devel about this topic.

Without consultation, meaning nobody asked you? Consider me consulted. 
And seeing how well this and related discussions are going, it's quite 
likely that the result of that would have been coming up with no new 
strategy at all, and giving up in disgust instead.

> One isolated developer developed the
> strategy you like, and he spread it around existing modes as far as he
> could, again, without any consultation that I'm aware of.

The "isolated developer" has been an Emacs maintainer for many years, 
and the strategy in question has been in use for many years now, across 
many packages. So trying to reduce its current importance to "one 
isolated developer" is disingenuous, and rather insulting.

> If that
> discussion had taken place, likely the strategy would be better thought
> out, more widely applicable, and better implemented with less resulting
> bad feeling.

By now, you've had every chance to analyze its current usage, benefits, 
drawbacks, and present a decent alternative that does not regress in 
important aspects, which I'm sure is possible (everything has space for 
improvement).

Instead, we've only seen lots of opinionated statements, complaints 
about being forced to switch (this is between you and Stefan, although I 
also suspect that it could help deal with a lot of CC Mode's performance 
problems, current and future ones), and one flimsy and rather obvious 
bug report.

> ...
> You've got a strategy in Ruby Mode which works, and you'll note I've
> never tried to talk you into abandoning that strategy.

That's not true. You've critiqued it a lot (does that not count as 
persuading to abandon?), and you've tried to push a new incompatible 
facility that would cause problems for syntax-ppss users in the long 
run. Or, at least, is very likely to.